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336 pages, Hardcover
First published July 18, 2023
A man has a hierarchy of crime, of what is morally acceptable and what is not, a crook manifesto, and those who subscribe to lesser codes are cockroaches. Are nothing.
It was his own fault. He had been on the straight and narrow for four years, but slip once and everybody is glad to help you slip hard. Crooked stays crooked and bent hates straight. The rest is survival.
Churn.Carney’s word for the circulation of goods in his illicit sphere, the dance of TVs and diadems and toasters from one owner to the next, floating in and out of people’s lives on breezes and gusts of cash and criminal activity. But of course churn determined the straight world too, memorialized the lives of neighborhoods, businesses. The movement of shop owners in and out of 383 West 125th Street, the changing entities on the deeds downtown in the hall of records, the minuet of brands on the showroom floor.
It was the Jackson 5 after all who put Ray Carney back in the game following four years on the straight and narrow.
…
What else was an ongoing criminal enterprise complicated by periodic violence for, but to make your wife happy?
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Crooked stays crooked.
…
A man has a hierarchy of crime, of what is morally acceptable and what is not, a crook manifesto, and those who subscribe to lesser codes are cockroaches. Are nothing.
…
If you know what the future holds, what it will look like, you can buy it cheap, today.
"From then on whenever he heard the song he heard the song he thought of the death of Munson. It was the Jackson 5 after all who put Ray Carney back in the game following four years on the straight and narrow. The straight and narrow--it described a philosophy and a territory, a neighborhood with borders and local customs. Sometimes when he crossed Seventh Avenue on the way to work he mumbled the words to himself like a rummy trying not to weave across the sidewalk on the way home from the bars."
"Another bad omen. Too many to count. Harlem wasn't the same. Crooks these days had no code and less class."
"In the midst of the daily Jim Crow tribulations and humiliations, Lady Betsey's family had assembled the instructions for an eternal feast. A refreshing scorpion spike of heat lay hidden in the collards, and the mac and cheese was a symphony of competing textures, but the chicken was divine, fried in the very skillet of heaven. The house dredge was no mere spicy dusting of cornmeal but a crispy concoction of buttermilk, flour, and dream stuff. To penetrate that wall of batter and gain the meat inside was to storm the keep of pleasure. Local politicians and famous songsmiths posed with the owner in photographs, amid framed citations and plaques from the spectrum of Harlem organizations--the big, the small, and the spurious."
"He was here tonight because a boy he didn't know was caught in a fire, and a spark had caught Carney's sleeve. To avenge--who? The boy? To punish bad men? Which ones--there were too many to count. The city was burning. It was burning not because of sick men with matches and cans of gas but because the city itself was sick, waiting for fire, begging for it. Every night you heard the sirens. Pierce blamed years of misguided policy, but Carney rejected that narrow diagnosis. From what he understood about human beings, today's messes and cruelties were the latest versions of the old ones. Same flaws, different face. All of it passed down."